Amy Radin is a growth advisor and problem solver for FinTech and MarTech businesses. She has spent over two decades in the marketing, digital, and innovation sector and is currently a member of the Fast Company executive board. Amy joins Melissa to discuss implementing digital transformation in our organizations through relationships.
Show Notes
Melissa Perri’s guest on this week’s Product Thinking Podcast is Amy Radin. Amy is a growth advisor and problem solver for FinTech and MarTech businesses. She has spent over two decades in the marketing, digital, and innovation sector and is currently a member of the Fast Company executive board. Amy joins Melissa to discuss implementing digital transformation in our organizations through relationships.
Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Amy talk about in this episode:
Amy’s professional background and how she got into digital transformation.
You can’t solve new problems with old tools. Helping your organization feel comfortable and embrace a new way of doing processes is key.
It is important to build relationships with the influencers and decision-makers within an organization when you are seeking to implement digital transformation. Get a clear understanding of what success means to them. Once they believe that your first priority is to make them successful, you will win their trust and support.
When building organizational teams, there is no one-size-fits-all. You have to build on what exists within the organization at the moment as well as acknowledge that there are elements of culture that affect the organizational structure.
If employees are unable to adapt to new realities of change in their organizations, leaders have to ask themselves if they’ve given them enough opportunity to build new skills.
“You need to build a very diverse team when you're building change...it’s internal and external people who are bringing different life experiences, different backgrounds. You need diversity to solve hard problems,” Amy stresses.
We must focus on developing real empathy and deep understanding of our customers’ needs and bring this insight to the organization in a way they will find compelling.
How Amy gets her teams to take initiative.
Even on the worst days we have to maintain a sense of optimism and believe that we will get there.
“You have to look for the actions and behaviors that the organization and the leadership have done either at the organization, or in their prior roles that indicate they understand that you have a common expectation of what transformation and change means and what it takes,” Amy remarks.
The behavioral evidence Amy looks for that tells her that the company is ready for transformation.
Resources Amy Radin | LinkedIn | Twitter
Episode Transcript
Speaker 1: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day-to-day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole, the systems the processes and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers with the help of some boundary-pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions. We'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product.
Duct leader. This is the product Thinking podcast. Here's your host Melissa Perry. Welcome to another episode of the product Thinking podcast. Today, we have Amy Reed and on the show, she is really interesting person with an interesting background to in, creating change, in large organizations, and I'm excited about her sharing her stories.
So, welcome. Amy to the
Speaker 2: podcast. Thank you, Melissa is great to be here. Thanks for having me on the show, great. So, I thought you have a great perspective on leading change in large organizations, and you've worked on some really
Speaker 1: You're seeing projects there are two for the audience, I met Amy through a mutual friend and she's been a mentor at our cp0 accelerator for a while now and the advice that she's given to our product leaders has just been amazing. So many really good stories about, you know, being an executive and leading change. And I wanted her to share that perspective with us. So I'm excited to have her here. But Amy before we dive in, can you give a little background to our audience and tell them a little bit about yourself?
Speaker 2: Sure. But I definitely, We have the stars and scars as one of my friends says being a change agent. So I spent the first 15 years of my career as a direct marketer at American Express, which is really a world-class company. And then at the internet bug and ended up leading the digital transformation of City's credit card business, which at the time was a five billion dollar klf Peak serving over 200 million accounts.
So the digital transformation of Massive, massive business that but there was a lot of earnings pressure and in a highly regulated company. I ended up becoming City's first Chief Innovation officer and following that had a couple of other corporate roles at companies like, AXA and E-Trade. About seven years ago, left the corporate world.
And these days, I advise Syntec and more tech companies as well as Global brands on how to advance growth starting with understanding customer needs.
And then Executing Innovation strategies which means managing change so they can achieve exceptional results. I've offered a book topic called The changemakers. Playbook had a succeed in scale invasion in any company and really enjoy mentorship which is why it's fun to be part of the CPO accelerator.
Speaker 1: That's amazing. So many of the people that I've worked with are, you know, in the position that you probably were at city starting, a digital transformation, trying to figure out what do we do with that? How did you get roped into that? How did Start becoming what was eventually the chief Innovation officer there,
Speaker 2: right? Well, the digital role, you know, back and if this is going back I can't believe 20 years. But I was working at a retail bank and I started getting Headhunter call to join all these startup companies. You know, this was in the days and are proceeding the NASDAQ, boom and bust, which hopefully some of your listeners, still have all that.
And I was like, you know, these don't really make sense but their odds of something and Wow. Seems like there's some connection between my background, which is working with technologists, and data and customer insight to develop new products and services, and deliver them in a complex business. And I feel like, you know, he's like, that would be really useful to these digital goals.
And so, I was recruited to the role at city and just, you know, my instinct was to know, this is where the world was going. And so I sort of left the world of direct mail.
And lie to the internet and never look back and, you know, back then nobody had any experience doing digital transformation. You know, it was at the point where Executives in big companies were realizing like, wow, this matter. As we better take this seriously. This is not going away, but it was very unprecedented. So it was a really great time. What really helped me was seeing that connection between the core skills that I had, and being able to apply them in a whole new
Speaker 1: way. It is amazing suit. How long ago was this as well? Just to orient, our users around
Speaker 2: 2,000, 2,000 of them. What happened with? They ended up becoming Chief Innovation officer was. So I was reporting to the CEO of the, the credit card business and I was in his office one day for a one-to-one and he said, you know, Amy I want you to do something a bit of innovation because we're not Innovative and we need to be Innovative and you know, he was Great bottom-line oriented manager.
He actually had been hit been a CFO, so he came from the analytic functions and he saw the writing on the wall with respect to the business model. And this was even back in 2003 2004 and my view was, you know, your boss asks you to do something, especially if it's a CEO, its kind of suicidal to say no. And I remember still that feeling thinking well, does he think I'm really smart or is he just sticking it to me?
Like, if I draw the Short Straw or that's like sure, Sure, I'll go figure that out, no problem and just through networking somehow, I met a guy named Larry Keeley and Larry.
Now runs the global Invasion practice for Deloitte but he had co-founded a company called doblin which is one of the original Innovation consultancy. And Larry took me under his wing and became my mentor and he was the person who really exposed me to the fact that Innovation is not cool stuff. It's not throwing stuff against the wall to see what he'll stick.
But Is discipline and Method and process. It's just very different from the discipline and Method and process that we apply to bring a mature business. And I think that's what's really key when you're going down any path of change or transformation, you can't solve new problems with old tools and that's where a lot of the change and transformation challenge has come in is recognizing that and helping leave the organization to embrace new ways of doing things.
And feel comfortable with those kinds of changes
Speaker 1: that seems like a really lofty mandate, right? Like okay, we need to innovate so when the CEO of told you about this said you know I want to we're not Innovative, we want to innovate, did he have any like outcomes I was trying to reach. Was there any structure around it or was he like go out and figure out how we become
Speaker 2: Innovative? Well that was an understanding I think the recognition was and you know every business model has a challenges. I think the recognition of that Point was the business model for the credit card business. At that point it's still largely true. The case it's driven by a machine of constantly acquiring new customers, right?
So you're just constantly like feeding the Beast, getting new customers and at that point it was through, massive, Direct Mail programs. I and then you manage those relationships to profitability, where the biggest risk to profitability is credit losses. If people not not paying me back. And so there's other levers in the p&l and the Sheets.
But that's basically what it's about. There was a recognition, you know, there's only so much population, we've got a lot of cards out there and you could start to feel the exhaustion in the bottle. So it was at a very high level.
It was an understanding of the challenge to the business model at a granular level. And then in between that there was like, well, somehow, the internet is going to play a role because we can see this catching on. But then in terms of what matters, how do you get there? And how do you measure none of that? Second place, we were really starting from a blank piece of paper and I guess I love a challenge like that, we just, we had to figure things out and we did, we made our share of mistakes but we did, we did some smart things and I'm happy to share those with you. I'll share the mistakes,
Speaker 1: too. Yeah, I would love to hear both of those things. I'm curious. Like, we're, did you start? This is a super lofty thing, right? Like, let's go out and innovate and create new ways to actually get customers or it sounds like also create new revenue streams or something like that. So we use Start, when you start a transformation like this, where did you
Speaker 2: start? Okay, well, first of all, I'm going to share kind of the idealized version. So I'll give you where, I think one should start. And I definitely had my fits and starts one of the very first things I did, when I join city was one around instead one-to-one. Time with each of my, each of my colleagues.
So they were all we're all direct reports to the CEO. And there were about 13 of us. Had a very large bench and really important to understand start to build Nation ships with the influencers and decision makers to what you're trying to do. Because whether you're ahead of digital or chief product officer or chief Innovation officer chances are you are not managing the pl and ultimately the business priority is the funding for investment are going to be coming from elsewhere in the organization.
And there's other functions that have to buy in, right? The CFO. It's to buy in, in the case of a lending business, the risk management function compliance because we're highly regulated. People who get to weigh in on what you're trying. To do so very, very critical up front to build relationships built.
Trust make sure that you have a clear understanding of what success means to them. And this is the piece that took me a little while to learn, but it's very important. You have to really buy into irrespective of what your job description says. And what your goal say, Your Role is to make them successful and if you can really get into that mindset and has nothing to do with hierarchy or who has the power, What if they believe that you that your first priority is their success, you will win their trust and you will win their support and you will win their desire to prioritize.
The things that you want to do. So, to be able to build trust at that level and for you to own that mindset and have your team by into that. That's very important. Because change, it's not just rational, right? I work for I worked with a group of the most quantitatively oriented people on Earth, you know, they could run circles around me.
Me on business cases even though I have an MBA. So it's not about the business case, it's all it is but it's also about the emotional challenges of change, right? How is this going to affect my career? Am I going to get promoted? What kind of as my bonus? How does that affect my family and see if I have acknowledged to change?
Is also very emotional and that's why the trust piece isn't going to be earned, just based on stuff on a spreadsheet. It's really building those relationships and demonstrating your commitment to their success. So, that's very, very important. One more day today, tactical basis. We devised a process and approach to pull in people from the app, from around the organization to engage in what we were doing.
So, one of our strengths as a direct marketing, based business was that testing and learning and experimentation is engineered into the business model of a direct marketing business, right?
You know, you don't put out a program that having test cells. So that is part of who we were. They said, okay. Okay, we're not going for a big bag. When I try to blow the business up, we're going to build on our DNA to test and learn to test some learner. I into, what's the impact of the internet on the business model for up business on customer relationships, on customer service, on credit and fraud, Etc.
So then it came down to okay, well, how are we going to figure out what to test? Because it was like everything we would hold brainstorming sessions where we pulled in people from the product teams people from Risk management and other functions to go through a process of identifying things, that would be good to test analyzing them as best. We could prioritizing them and then developing test plans.
So you start to build that buy-in and engagement up and down the organization. So that was another level that we worked at the third thing that we did, which was critical was I built an extremely close working relationship with our analytic functions.
So, in a credit card business, you've got obviously CFO, but more important in the near term was risk management and what we call decision management. So we have like a world-class decision Sciences function, and I built a very close partnership with them. I used to say they were like sweater, would they were the neutral party?
They had no stake in the outcome. They were just objective and so we gave them. They had the power and authority. Again, skills to structure the test and analyze the results. So, it wasn't my team saying, here's what happened, they would come back and that was their role in the organization and they were respected and trusted to do that.
And so they were really a very close partner in our success. I think that's the third thing is to really think about who do you need to have those day in and day out, working Partnerships to help you be successful and really leverage the rest of the organization versus trying to Internalize your team, everything that you need, you're much better off.
Taking advantage of what's there and how the organization work today.
Speaker 1: The thing that you said to about, right up front about people being worried during a digital transformation that really resonated with me. I've been part of so many digital Transformations lately and that's like me a really long thing time to learn like oh people are actually scared of this because they don't know is their role going to be around what's going to happen to their bonus. How do I get judged by success anymore?
I'm curious with a lot of the companies I've worked with to the big question comes down to what is our team look like? And if we are transforming, it means we need to now have new roles and I usually get pulled in when it's like, okay, we need a have product managers what, you know, we've never had product managers before. Let's take a bunch of people from the business train them, get them up to speed.
What have you seen work? Really well when building a team for functions that haven't really existed before like how did Do you think about structuring it? Did you take anybody from the organization and start to train them in new ways?
What have you seen work? And what do you suggest for other companies that are going through this,
Speaker 2: right? So that's a great question and I definitely had to go through that because there was no model. First of all, I don't think there is one size fits all model that you could apply across organizations, or even in a particular sector, right? Because you've got to build upon what's there. And there are elements of culture.
That will affect structure. And there's just the way things are. And so, you want to figure out, you know, how do I build upon and honor what's there? So what I did and it doesn't, you know, you make mistakes, you know, you tried things, you step back, you learn things, you move ahead. So it's not all going to come out perfectly in one shot, but there was a point where I realized that we needed to build a strong internal you.
X capability. We had a small ux team that had been doing direct mail.
They were like an in-house Direct Mail agency and they had been kind of the core of the ux team and things became increasingly sophisticated. We realize you know what the really our ux skills, you know that information architecture. There's always other things that you need to understand and although the creative skills are direct mail there things that are relevant you really need more and we needed to Analyze that function versus using an outside Agency for everything because just the sheer volume of stuff that we were producing and it was just not cost efficient.
So we said, you know what, for all the day in day out, changes to the ux grinding, things out doing Quick Test. We're going to do that internally. We're just going to use an agency for big strategic projects, like a homepage redesign. So that was the first decision is, what do we want to internalize?
And where are we going to use external support and that was a really key decision because that's her. Bigger than an RFP for agency. But then for the internal I was fully aware of my own limitations and being one of these people who came from a direct mail background. I said, well, I've really understand how this works.
I just started to I benchmarked I got and I did not hire Consultants to Benchmark. Sorry, I'm good networker and I got connected with people in similar roles a very different companies. I remember I spoke to Somebody in a roll equivalents mind and Microsoft somebody the time at Walmart, you know? So when for real diversity of thought, I really talk to them about how they develop their organization structures and really starting at the direct report level because that's the most important thing you do.
Once you get your direct Port report bench in place, the rest of it is much easier to fall into place but just by talking to other peers and understanding how they made the decision. So I wasn't looking for them to tell me what to do. I was looking to understand how they figured it out and That gave me a lot of ideas and guidance for how to structure my team and then obviously, you come back to the realities of budget and FTE in terms of internal and external, that's a really good question to, you know, I've heard people it different company say, well, we have to get all new people, like, our people don't know how to do this and I find that to be very unfortunate in almost a sad statement.
If people aren't able, you know, aren't exhibiting the Readiness to adapt to the new reality and Later should be asking themselves well to they know what's expected. Have we made the investment or given them the opportunity to build new skills. Have we create a good development assignments for people?
And I found it was really important to have a mix of outside and inside and I know we talked about this on the CPO accelerator, the other day that the internal people have immensely, important institutional knowledge, they have relationships. They know why things are the way they are. They are they know how the plumbing of the organization works.
Even something like just data extraction, which ends up being a huge issue and an obstacle to change often. It's the internal people who understand how to extract the data from systems where there may be no documentation, we were pulling data from systems that were written Cobalt, what's that?
So you really need that, and the internal people have the relationships, they have the credibility, they may Big influencers and you will not be. I've always wanted to be a leader. Who is viewed as somebody who develop people. So it's very important for your reputation and growth as a leader people want to see, that's how you become a talent magnet by being committed to helping people move up in their careers.
On the other. Have you do need new skills. When we decided we needed a head of ux, I recruited a very talented person from out of the oil industry, who had significant experience on on doing this because we absolutely did not Have a talent internally, you know, there were other skills where we absolutely had to go outside, so it's really figuring out that mix.
The end of the day, you need to build a very diverse team when you're, when you're building change. So it's internal, external people who are bringing different different life experiences, different backgrounds. I mean, you just, you need diversity to solve hard problems. That's my fundamental philosophy about how you accomplish
Speaker 1: change. Yeah, I think that's really smart. I've seen so many organizations that I've worked. It have refused to hire any outside people in the product management field, especially so they take a lot of project managers or subject matter experts and we train them to be product managers, but I find that it doesn't bring the diversity of thought that you need and then it's also hard because the team level product managers who are learning this for the first time they don't have anybody to learn from right.
Like I can only come in as a consultant and teach so much, but then you need that like day-to-day coaching or somebody to watch who's done it before so that you can get really, really Really good at what you do and that always kind of frustrated me a little bit with companies where they wouldn't look for, you know, some director levels from outside the organization, mix it up and get some more senior PM's. You've done it before. Instead, it's always been like, let's just take all these people and change to their roles into product managers, but I agree, like the ones I've seen Beast the most successful, they've got some kind of mix going on where everybody can learn from each other.
And I think that helps so much.
Speaker 2: I think it's really important. I think the other thing is And when you bring in outside people, you've got to set them up for Success because sometimes grafting odd, an outsider creates its own set of talents, but that person, especially if they're coming from a very different sector. If they coming from aggregation is different culture.
It's important to be thoughtful about. Is there going to be enough of a fit and has this person demonstrated success at transitioning into a different organization? You know, how they Act that those kinds of transitions in the past and how will you as a leader support their transition? So they have, you know, and their first 90 day plan, they established themselves in the organization so people are glad that they're there are willing to take direction from them.
Speaker 1: That's a really good point. And the in the people internally to, when they're going through this, a lot of the product managers, I talked to who are part of some sort of digital transformation there a little stuck, right? They go. Okay, I just learned this new thing. We did all this training You know, there might be a couple other people in this organization.
Now who are doing the same things, I want to start working this way like I want to learn from our users. I want to do experimentation, I want to set strategy well but my management doesn't know about that right? Or they don't agree with it or it's not their way of working. I want to be able to change their minds like how do I go?
Convince my leadership that this is the way to work. So I get that question all the time and that's pretty much what your book is on so curiously. Like what would be your advice for a product manager? They might be Team level, they might not have any clout in the organization, but to be a change maker, right?
Like how do they get started with that?
Speaker 2: Well, I think it goes back to internally really understanding how the influencers a decision makers, what a success mean to them. And having a really embracing in your own mind, I'm coming to work to make them successful and having them. And then The behavior that helps them, understand that that's sort of one bucket of stuff to chew on and say, you know, how do I make that happen?
The other is bringing the customer perspective to the table. Now, one of the big, very eye-opening for me, working with startups, over the last six, or seven years because in my old days, in the Fortune, 100 were all. I wanted to go to customers. You know, you need a couple hundred thousand dollars for research project.
Well, I realized like That isn't really necessary, any of us can do, you know, man on the street interviews woman on the street interviews, or friends and family.
You know, there are ways to start a customer Discovery process that you not have to cost a lot of money. The great thing about about iPhones is that we're all videographers. Now, I find if you bringing customer insight to the table in a way that is, Compelling. That's why video can be really. It's one way that's good.
Bringing a competitive insight to the table and using that, but especially the customer Insight, the thing about competitor inside that I get a little nervous about is, you don't want to hang your hat on. Well, they're doing this because then you put yourself in a follower position and I personally am not into being a follower. I like to, I want to figure out how what's my point of difference.
So, I think focus on how can you develop real empathy and deep? Understanding of customers needs and then bring that insight to people in the organization in a way that they will find interesting and compelling.
You know you can your business has a call center, spend an hour a week monitoring calls, you know, reach at transcript, talk to the customer service agents are all kinds of ways, informally to become more understanding. Another is, just go ahead and build prototype. If there's something you really believe in create a wireframe and Pitch it I think there are things you can do that are hours of work or days, not weeks or months, to show people what you mean. And why it's important to you can't argue it off a PowerPoint. You have to really think like the entrepreneur.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that makes that's a really good point. I find that a lot of people to especially Junior people. You know, they're free to actually take that first step. Like they ask for permission before they feel confident to dive in and do a prototype or Or or go get research. How do you handle that with your team, especially for things that they haven't done before? Or maybe you didn't have a very robust prototyping process? Like how do you get people to just take initiative and feel like they can go start those
Speaker 2: things? First of all, I had a great mentor in one of the division presidents. I worked under American, Express years ago, one of his sayings was ask forgiveness, not permission and I think also is a function of growing up the middle of five children. I tested Learn to assert my opinion about things I wasn't.
Yeah, I'm not high I think a couple of things. First of all, when you're recruiting, you want to look for you want to hire people who have a track record of take initiative. I think it's very, very important and it's a simple in the interview process, you know, tell me about a time that you took initiative to do something that that hadn't occurred to other people in your organization or if they're coming out of college, kind of time that you took initiative to To kick off a project at school so I think you've gotta you've gotta look for that in the screening process.
I don't know that you can create an initiative, or you want to invest in that. That's you want to find people who have the. Other thing is, it's your responsibility as the leader to provide air cover to your team. You know, you're a little bit sending them out on missions to do things where they will probably encounter some controversy or at a minimum lots of questions and they have to All that you have their back.
You know I remember as a funny story there was a project I worked on that we worked on at city that ended up having remarkable results but but it took us a while to convince the organization to work with us. We have this. We have this theory that if we created an ability for people who could not pay their bills to renegotiate payment terms online instead of by talking to a collections agent, which can be kind of a threatening experience, that we would increase.
Increase our rates of recovery and that's like critical to the financials of a credit card business. And the idea was viewed as so unorthodox by the organization that it took us literally a couple of years to get a test file customers with whom. We could conduct an experiment to see if an online experience, created an incremental impact, on, recoveries.
And I remember the person on my team who was assigned to Work on this project. I just kept sending them back, you know he you know he'd go meet with the credit operations people and they say it like you're nuts. We're not going to invest in this test. It's a bad idea. I was like, no we really have to do this but he knew that I had his back and that I was going to speak to the the boss of the person he was dealing with and that I would advocate for it in executive meetings.
Explain. So he kept going back into the ring because he knew it was safe to do so. And then it was a huge success. So you've got to look for the basic wiring of initiative and you've got to be willing, you've got to show your team but you're going to be there for
Speaker 1: them. Yeah, I think that's so important. My friend just got so of calls it. The shit umbrella for his team. He's like, you got to be the person of flocks. All the, all the stuff coming down from from management and everybody, which I think is hilarious but such a, you know, an appropriate analogy for that.
But yeah, that makes total sense for that. Did you know I have a course for product managers that you could take, it's called Product Institute over the past seven years. I've been working with individuals teams and companies to upskill their product chops through my fully online school. We have an ever-growing list of courses to help you work through your current product.
Dilemma visit product Institute.com, and learn to think like a great product manager. Use code thinking to save $200 at checkout on our Premier course product management.
Ins. So when you are doing this transformation as well, I'm curious you know you must have had a lot of lessons learned. What were the things that you look back on? And you're like, man, I really wish we would have approached that differently or done that differently.
Speaker 2: Patience is not a strong suit of mind. I'm the kind of person who if I see an opportunity. It's like, okay, let's go get it. And the thing is, when you hire people who see a different future, and they want to get there, they will. Tend to be those kind of people and you want that because that's the motivation, the energy, the passion, the drive that you need to create change because creating change is hard and it does take a lot out of you.
On the other hand, you've got some really accept an internalized, the fact that if you run too fast, you will leave everybody behind kind of, if you're running a race and you're two laps ahead of the next, I've, you know, if you're running a race and the Person ahead of you is two less ahead. You're going to drop out of the race, going to say like it's hopeless, I can't catch up, but if you're close enough, you can say, you know what I have a chance. I want to run and catch up so you've got to really accept that.
Think about how do you modulate the pace of change that people want to follow you?
Because in the end, it's getting, especially if you're in a large organization, you need for the organization to follow you. In order to end up at a result that can scale, And so, how do you do that? It comes back to the hard work of day and day out relationship-building Bring internal people onto the team and setting them up for success, with external hires, who can also Mentor them building relationships with influencers and decision-makers up through the c-suite.
One thing I didn't mention which, you know, that it takes time and you've got to be optimistic even on the really worst days. You've got to maintain a sense of optimism and believe that you will get there. One of the things we didn't talk about that, I think I took for granted because I always had it was you've got to have executive sponsorship.
So if you're contemplating a major change initiative, you see an opportunity and you're convinced it's real, you've got to build executive sponsorship, I reported to the CEO and he told me to go make the business more Innovative. I was hired into the role to had a digital transformation. So, I was established from Wanted he also really, really believe.
You know, I wasn't just to check the box higher, he knew we had to do this. That's very important and you want to make sure you've got that support. And if you're not sure, I would say figure it out and if you've got to build more support, think about what your, what's the process to get by it. You know, and that could involve starting with talking to a potential sponsor about here's a vision that I really see.
It could be Positive for your goals. What would it take me to win your support as a sponsor and then negotiate what that looks like and that itself could involve a couple of months back and forth conversation but really important to have that in place.
Speaker 1: Yeah I think that brings up such a good point. I've seen so many digital transformation initiatives, get started, the CEO says they want it, but then when it actually gets down to brass tacks and doing it, they get scared, right? Or something happens where they're like oh I didn't realize that would change.
How can you tell if you do have full on buy-in to go down this? And I guess to, like, you know, a good example of when I was doing this at one company, the pace of releasing software slowed, down while everybody was trying to figure out these new ways of working, right, especially in, like, an agile transformation, or something like that. And the executives went nuts.
They were so mad because they were like, all our teams are terrible. They're not releasing anything. I think you just changed all their job roles Literally yesterday, like how can you expect them to be able to keep up the piece of what they were doing before?
When they have to learn this entire new way of working, plus you they're just hired a training program, you've got McKinsey and here doing something else like a lot of stuff is going on right now. Like of course they're not going to be able to do all of their work and then some, right? And like I said, I feel like something that could have say expected to go from 0 to 2 100 in like three days.
So how do you, how do you keep expectations in line for that and then also, You make sure that you know, you have full buy-in to actually do these things and they understand what they're getting into before you, you jump into lead one of these Transformations or take a job in a place that's actually
Speaker 2: transforming. And you know, they may not understand and I actually was in that situation and what are the reasons why I ended up leaving the corporate world, is that I found myself in a situation where I was hired to drive a marketing and digital transformation. And then I always say to my friends, you know, I think when they, I found out what was involved.
They decided they really want. Because you're right these kinds of Transformations. They do not day inside a functional, Silo, a marketing and digital transformation and product. In the world, I come from strongly intersects with marketing, end up affecting the entire organization especially these days.
When product from the customers perspective, very often, you know, it should really include the experience includes customer service it includes. The experience of purchasing the product. And so it's much more us as customers. We take a much more holistic view of what the product is that how companies to find what their product is.
And so it's going to affect if you want to get it right. And really differentiate yourself in a way that is compelling and enduring. In today's market, you're going to disrupt many, many aspects of the organization. And yeah, I think in many cases, that is not well. Well, understood, I think one of the MIT against for that is to, you know, if you're in the job, I mean, certainly if you're interviewing for that, kind of job is to really do your homework and ask questions.
And I think not just by asking, are you really up for this but he'll learn about the culture of the organization. When was the last time they get awarded some examples of major changes that they've undertaken and how they Implement that them. So I think talk is cheap, it's all about Behavior. You have to For the actions and behaviors and things that the organization and the leadership have done either there, or their prior roles.
That indicate that they understand that you have a common expectation of what transformation and change means of what it takes. You have to look for Behavioral evidence. If you're there already, I think the way to get going is I go back to my days as a direct marketer small experiments. So even our view in digital banking even with a highly supported CEO and even with the Partnerships that I built.
So I had a good base of support and a belief that we had to go. There was our viewers, we're going to invest in lots of small experiments. We understand that many either won't work out or will require another experiment but that we can fund those experiments and we're going to keep our budgets really, really tight.
So you want to work with as limited resources as you can early on.
Sub to create some proof and that's what's really like a very early stage founder. You want to get a small proof point with as little resources as you can you build credibility you get some more resources, you can some more resources. You want to get those early proof points to the people want to get on board. Don't go after a big budget. I think that it's a big mistake or for you burn that proof and have sponsorship. What would you
Speaker 1: do if somebody gave you like a big budget to starve myself? Some of the places Is that I think are transforming now. They're like, oh, we're going to do the whole thing in three to five years. And let's take 1,000 people and go for it, right? Like what should they watch out for? You know, expecting a big bang transformation like
Speaker 2: that. That makes me very nervous. I don't know that I would want to do that job. I mean, first of all, it depends upon what's been done most recently. So if it's a start from zero that would raise a big red flag for me, I would really want to create a roadmap Of quarter, by quarter at least for the first year of what's required. What do you want to do? You know, what's the goal? What are you trying to accomplish? And what are the assumptions and start to create a roadmap of what you really need to me? That's a red flag. The idea of just doing a big bag.
Speaker 1: Yeah it seems very risky to me. Do it was risky, so it happened a bunch of times, okay? So when you're looking for signs to with this leadership, you mentioned looking for Behavioral evidence like changed. That they've done in the past. What are like some specific types types of things that you would look for and say, oh yes, that is somebody who gets it. I want to go work for that person like this. Seems like a person that's going to work out. Well,
Speaker 2: I would say somebody who Chris, Paul, how do they manage budgets? So often times the first year will be budgeted and then are they? And then as soon as they're some little hiccup in the business, the budget gets cut. So The second year comes around and all of a sudden you're back in the queue starting over for funding.
So how does budge didn't work? And it's there some kind of track record or evidence of how, you know, multi-year Investments are secured. You know, the thing about transformation is it doesn't really happen on a fiscal year. If you work for a big company, you're stuck in this very rigid fiscal year, strategic planning process and where everything's geared around.
The calendar, how the board, approves the budget and then how the, how reports are issued to Wall Street? And it has nothing to do with the reality of customer expectations and needs. And what it really takes to get stuff done. So it's really important to have to understand how budgeting works and how the chief executive and the CFO, what is their attitude to managing Investments that don't fit neatly and tidily into the fiscal year.
That's the first thing. Certainly if you can understand from the organization's history or the history of the senior Executives who there may be examples from other companies of how what have there been experiences, what are their experiences been managing change in the past? How do they on board for kind of projects? They like to sponsor. Are they people who act as executive sponsors? Do they enjoy mentoring people? And I think you want to Probe on the things that are important to you but those are some of the things I look for evidence of Definitely the budget. The budget is a big one.
Speaker 1: I never would have thought of budget first. I think that's a really, really good tip and it does make sense. I've seen it a lot where, you know, you get to a certain point. And well, I think a couple weird things with budget one team actually told me that they basically reached their goals of what they had planned.
In July of the year, they did it under budget to, as they were trying to do this like lean agile transformation. But if they had just Up there and not use their budget, they would have gotten budget next year in the same amount. So what do they do? They went back and they just blew it all on a bunch of random stuff that nobody needed.
That was not strategic that did not align with anything because they, they were like we need to spend our budget. Otherwise, we will not get budget next year and I was like, wow, that's an incredibly broken system. And this was at a very large financial institution where this happened trying to do an agile transformation trying to do a digital transformation and that's how they were managing their budget.
And I was like, wow. Wow. This is going to be problems down the road
Speaker 2: and maybe that's a side of not having the right, you know, a constructive relationship with the CFO. I am the first one to have always coached my teams that it is almost worse to give money back than it is to go over budget. However, I would never have supported just randomly throwing money. It's so we would accrue for the following year where we could legitimately you know, Accounting practices accrue so that we could use up unspent money.
But, you know, I think of you face that kind of situation. If you've built a good open relationship with the CFO, it's very important to go have a conversation with them about, you know, here's where we are since Good. Deeds should not be punished, we've got a proposal for things that we could do that.
We think would be incredibly important for the organization and we'd like to make sure that those are seen as a smart things to do.
Or if you really cannot use the money, then you give the money back but understand up front, you know, make your concern clear because I understand that because you'll show that you came in below plan and then you're going to show a big increase the font. Yeah. I know the drill and it's really it's because big companies have a history of following zero you know budgeting processes where it's a start with the last year and go forward.
There's I think there's more companies Try to do zero based budgeting but very often, the default is what you spend this year. How much you gonna spend next year? And that's not in a world of changed. That it's probably not the best approach, but it is the default.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. If things are changing, it doesn't feel like you could actually know what you're going to spend next year. If you're not doing the same thing, you were doing a lot last year, so that that makes a lot of
Speaker 2: sense. That's why comes back to sponsorship that? Because in the end, the Budget, especially if you're a junior person, you have to understand what the CEO the CFO up against, they have to take the budget to the board for approval. And what is one of the tests that have boards are not into the operational detail of what's happening at the business at the level of a product manager.
Not any place closed. So a tried-and-true technique to understand. If the budget seems correct is to look for their answers and it makes sense. You know, we all do that in life, All the time and look at what's changed as a means of quickly, validating that theme seeing okay, but that can go awry right in the kind of situation described.
And so if there is executive sponsorship for the change that you're undertaking, that CEO or CFO will proactively explain to the board, we are reallocating resources from here to here because of our transformation and that's why you're going to see an abnormally.
Big decrease in spending here and an unexplained, maybe an unusually high increase. Their that that's part of the conversation that the CEO and the CFO have to have to have with the board. But that will only happen if there is sponsorship and Real Alignment and buy it to the value of the transformation initiative,
Speaker 1: that makes so much sense. I always love talking to you Amy to because you bring such a nice perspective and empathy for like, what are the executives doing? And you have to remember This is not just, everybody's willy-nilly like this is what their job is. This is what they do. This is how you relate to them, and I'm always so excited when you share that with our CTO accelerator students, it's such like a pleasure to, to listen to you with that too because I get a lot of a lot of product managers or product leaders.
Sometimes just be like, oh or CEOs dumb, they don't get it. Like, you know, this person is they don't have the empathy, right? Like they don't they don't think about what they do on a day-to-day basis and I always find that you bring such a great perspective. Of to this is what the executive team is doing.
This is how you have to relate to them.
Speaker 2: I mean, they're humans and I think my dad, I grew up in Brooklyn and my dad always used to say. Now you can take the girl out of Brooklyn but you can't take the Brooklyn out of the girl and I think of myself, as you know, I'm very lucky and I worked hard to get to this executive level but the end of the day, I'm just a person and I have got my own personal life, my own challenges, my own career goals and I have my own set of demands placed. Start me in my role and a challenging, a very demanding and highly a set of colleagues to deal with and a CEO who is under immense pressure from the people above him.
And if you're in a division as I was, he didn't just have the board, he had the CEO and chair of the company, the colleagues at that level. And so you've got to really put yourself in their shoes and saying, well, what are they up against? What did they need to solve for? For and it comes back to where this conversation started.
How can I help them be successful based on what they are trying to get done and the challenges that they are facing.
And so, yeah, empathy is really important. So just like, we have to understand our customers needs and empathize with them on an emotional level. Not just understand the rationally is yet, do the same thing with your internal stakeholders to and remember they may be in the corner office and be enjoying, you know, whatever the benefits are these. To be an executive. But the end of the day, they're human being with personal challenges and goals and demands being placed on them as well. And you have to at least have a little bit of empathy for that.
Speaker 1: Really, really wise words. Well, thank you so much. Amy for being on the podcast today. If you want to learn more about Amy, definitely buy her book. It's a very good is called The changemakers Playbook. You can get it on Amazon, anywhere else. You want anybody to buy it from
Speaker 2: every place where, you know, all the big e-commerce site? It's or selling my book. So I'd love to be able to pick up
Speaker 1: a copy cool. So definitely get a copy of that where else can people go to learn more about you and more about your
Speaker 2: work, you can go to my website, which is a mere eight and.com. My last name is our API em, but to go to my website, you can also follow me on LinkedIn, and I'd love to hear from you
Speaker 1: sounds great. Well, thank you so much for being with us for our listeners. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please go to Apple or Spotify or wherever you're listening today and leave. Us a reading that would help us so much to have others, find it. We hope you enjoy the show and make sure you're also submit any of your questions for our dear Melissa segment. Which happens every other week where I get to answer all of your burning product management questions. I'm excited to read them coming in will see you next time.
